Comment by mathieuh

Well.

1. Self-diagnosis is not a diagnosis.

2. Things exist on a spectrum. The definition of it becoming a "disorder" is when it negatively affects your life enough.

During diagnosis a psychotherapist will be tasked with identifying traits of ADHD (IE; Markers), you will not have all markers. Everyone will have some.

Then those markers are investigated to discover how much they impact your quality of life. If it is above a certain threshold in aggregate then you are then diagnosed clinically as having "ADHD" and can be medicated.

What I mean is, for example: You can still have autism even if someone has significantly more severe autistic traits than you have.

Note that ADHD can manifest physically, mentally, or a combination of the two. I've been recently diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30s after finally seeing a psychiatrist, and at most my physical manifestation of it is minor fidgeting.

Where it really burns me is not being able to dedicate brainpower for more than a few minutes at a time, unless I'm in one of my "focus" modes. Similarly, my brain constantly has multiple tasks/"conversations" going on and I'm always thinking of something else. Additionally, I'm always chasing something novel to satisfy some dopamine hit.

I've honestly worked around a lot of the issues I deal with prior to being diagnosed, knowing when I'm not in a "focus" mode and trying to (gently) steer back to being productive. I joke about my "gaming ADHD" where I don't sit with a game for more than a half hour or so before moving on to something else. Internal dialogues are just something I work with.

Not saying you're right or wrong, but it's difficult to compare someone else's problems with your own (potential) issues.

e: Also note that there are non-stimulants on the market. I'm currently trialing one while I wait for a cardiologist to review some records for possible stimulant conflicts.

There are degrees to everything, and the same psych disorder can manifest in very different ways in different people.

I have been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder. I "worry too much", in general, and have the odd panic attack or two per year. Some people have it bad enough they get these attacks daily.

That does not mean I don't have it or that it does not affect me, it just means it's mild in comparison to them, but my anxiety is still high compared to the average person when untreated. It does not have to be crippling to affect you.

Sourced from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38162133

>Self diagnoses (and diagnoses over the internet) are pretty harmful

Self-diagnoses can be legitimate or not - depends on the person doing them. They are often a necessity, in an environment where a professional diagnosis takes thousands of dollars or years in waiting (and is often done badly, by ill-informed professionals, like the many-decades prevailing myth that women/girls "can't be autistic", or that "ADD and autism can't coincide").

As (in this case) they are also based not on bloodwork or some physical indicators, but on a subjective assessment of a person's way of thinking, the person having the actual experience is often more qualified than the professional. Same to how you don't really need a doctor to tell you you're gay.

>One might even argue that the labeling aspect of a certain disorder (particularly a mental one) by a "professional" to not be particularly helpful too in addressing ones problems

One might argue that the false dichotomy between professionals and laymen, where the former is supposed to hold all the keys to knowledge and the latter to passively consult and follow the advice of the former, is a problem in itself.

And a little outdated in modern societies where the "laymen" are not some mud dwelling peasants who never went to school and only know farm work, but univercity-educated (even over-educated) in their own right, and libraries are not confined to the rich or the scholars, but every book ever written is a click away.

In any case, a self-diagnosis doesn't give you the required paperwork to get drugs, or to get benefits, or specific accomondations, or anything like that. So it's not like it hurts society by taking resources from "legitimate" diagnoses.

Last, but not least, pointing that X symptoms is "quite common to ADD/ADHD" is not self-diagnosis, it's not even diagnosing. It's a suggestion hinting to a possible condition. It could very well be used for seeking a professional diagnosis.

Or do you think people with ADD/ADHD just go to the doctor to get diagnosed out of the blue, and not because of some similar suspicion, spotting some unexplained symptoms or themselves, or identification with some symptoms they've read about?

IIUC, there are two main components to ADHD, and you can have one, the other or both. And all qualify as ADHD.

I'm likely ADHD, and the majority of my siblings have it. There's a night and day difference though between me, who in a questionnaire scored high on both, and me who scored high only in one[1].

[1] Well, borderline in one and not the other. Immediately after taking the questionnaire I attended a work meeting and realized that there were at least a half dozen questions that I answered optimistically through rose-tinted glasses.

With all that said, I'm working to address my sleep apnea before getting a diagnosis because I've heard that sleep deprivation can manifest similar to ADHD.

My wife has a copy of the DSM 5 on our bookshelf, and flipping through it I noted that very many disorders have diagnostic criteria that, beyond just having some symptoms, they cause significant distress or impairment of functioning.

I had a friend growing up who was diagnosed with ADHD quite young whose experience was similar to your story–he had major issues with school that ultimately led to him being expelled, not going to college, having trouble with work and family etc. I thought of him a lot as so many of my classmates in a hyper-competitive school environment discussed how they could get a diagnosis and medication to have an edge on college admissions or whatever.

I assume that is how most people get through high-school and university? Intense focus on the couple days before finals / final projects. I too did that. Is that not the case or is that warning lights for ADHD?

High school you can get away with it because the course content is easier - college is much more challenging...

Yup! I wish more people who say they have ADHD could have that experience. If someone says they have ADHD but they are unmedicated and they already are holding down a decent job but are only recently kind of struggling with something they called distraction or issues with focus... Then I say they don't have ADHD because it's so much more than that. It is issues with actual executive function. It is being unable to put your shoes on because you can't keep a straight train of thought because someone else is distracting you and you can't help but following all those threads of distraction while you are trying to perform a manual task.

I was this person most of my life until medication in my late 30s. For some reason (probably the ADHD) I never really payed attention to it but was always kind of vaguely aware that doing simple things like getting ready for the day, or any kind of planning always seemed much more difficult for me than most others. The worst is the kind of decision paralysis that would happen where you have all of these competing priorities shouting for your attention at once, and your mind rapidly flits between them until you are so exhausted you just check out and go read some hacker news... oh that's how I ended up here.

There's a good chance you do have ADHD. I was in a similar place to you, and it's important to know that it manifests differently in different people, and that there is a rebound effect when you stop your meds so what you might have seen may have been much worse than their unmedicated state. If you have the money I'd suggest just getting tested.

My foot hurts everyday but next to someone who had their's amputated I'm okay; therefore, my foot is fine.

It presents in different ways. Someone isn't having 5 conversations, but could be drifting in and out of thoughts. It might just look like they aren't very interested. If it's more severe you would have more trouble controlling these kinds of things for a number of reasons related to the condition (poor executive function and impulse control).

I've met "people with ADHD" who seem to not have the condition at all, though pretty much always medicated. On the other hand, I've met people with far more clearcut symptoms, and I felt like I had way more in common with them. It sounded like they were living the exact same life.

I’d also suggest that any high IQ individual will by the very nature of being in an extreme of that IQ distribution exhibit some other behaviors that are in tails of the “normal” distribution for various behaviors.

I’ve had multiple people suggest to me I might have ADHD, it’s nonsense, I remember everything and don’t miss any deadlines. They observe me working simultaneously on many projects and since that is impossible for them, and frankly their memory is horrible, they don’t even remember correctly about the one project they are currently focused on, so suddenly they think this person is abnormal and hyper, ok they have ADHD.

id wager any human would increase in productivity when given speed